These are difficult times for those of us who are not wackos and enjoy watching our nation be torn apart for scrap. Not just talking about the job losses and the worries about the economy in general, but for the good-hearted Americans who are having a tough time watching what is unfolding in the country they love.

Some of these people are what I call Hallmark Americans. Or what Paul Campos over at Lawyers Guns and Money refers to as the Ariana Grande voters in that similar to someone who has heard of Grande but don’t know her songs, these folks know a bit about what is going on but not much of the details. They also have a concept of America that is based on a mix of mythology and privilege, fed to them throughout their life starting with school.

This is not going to be a hit piece on these folks because they are good people. One example I have been thinking about lately is a friend of mine who is one of the best people you will ever meet. He is extremely friendly and kind, and goes out of his way to make you feel welcome. Simply put, he is a joy of a human being.

I was at a music festival with him one year, and politics came up while we were all chilling out at our rented house, waiting to head in for another day of music. This was during Trump 1, and I said that the problem we face right now is that the Democratic Party is pro-democracy and the Republican Party is rapidly becoming anti-democracy, and my good-hearted friend’s expression was one you might expect if I said they were the party of puppy-eaters. It was a deep, visceral reaction.

Now, my friend is a Democrat, for sure, but his heart, which again is about the best of any person you might encounter, couldn’t allow him to contemplate the idea that perhaps the other party in the nation he deeply loves could be anything like anti-small-d-democratic. We are all Americans, after all, and the idea that some of us want authoritarianism is too much for someone like him to consider as possible.

There are a lot of people like my friend in America, and it’s one of the things that made our nation a good one at one time, with at least the potential to be great. They carried a sense of community and hopefulness, even in an America where a large and significant portion of the country was devolving into a mean-spirited, hateful selfishness. As exasperating or even hurtful as it could be, I learned to measure my reaction during the Obama years when I heard Democrats declare that racism was defeated or nearly so because Obama was president. This was not automatically because these folks didn’t want to deal with racism anymore, which is an accusation I have seen made, but instead, in some cases, it was based on a sense of hope. This hope was rooted in the strong belief that the arc of American history always bent towards justice, even if for my Native ancestors, this wasn’t always the case in America’s history. Therein lies the privilege; if you never experience it, then you sometimes don’t see it, and our society isn’t exactly designed to enable such people to see it.

Again, none of this is to put them down, but to point out that for these folks, the last two months have been a live-action horror movie unfolding all around them. They imagined they had rid themselve of that cancer, that it was all just a blip in history, that they could go back to saying “it’s not in my DNA to think that way about other people” in response to anyone pointing out the political opposition was full of hate and lust for dominance. But it was not to be.

The nation they learned about in school is in dire trouble, set upon by people full of evil beyond comprehension. This goes beyond any debate about taxes or regulatory bills to something more existential. It’s about what kind of nation we are all living in. The good-hearted people want to be in the nation their fathers and grandfathers fought in WWII for, a nation where their belief that all people are good at their base has a shot at being true.

If anything good comes out of this, it seems to have awakened a lot of people. The number of protests is up, and if anything, the people seem to be more understanding of what is happening than some of our elected officials. But it is very difficult to live through for anyone with a good heart.

The last word goes to Neil Young.